Saturday, August 13, 2005

(Via Fortune) David Kirkpatrick has written an excellent column on the business usage of RSS technologies. Blogs, and a related technology called RSS, may hold the future for software says Jim Moore – he and his partners have raised $100 million for the first-ever venture capital fund devoted to these technologies, called RSS Investors. Moore, thinks that blogs and RSS are ushering in "the democratization of web services." Moore while working with Dave Winer began to understand the business potential of blogs & RSS.Bigger Internet players are now snapping up firms that use these technologies. Flickr, recently bought by Yahoo, lets users share photos, post them to blogs, and send them from their camera-phones. And Bloglines was bought by Ask Jeeves, which is itself now being acquired by Interactive Corp. New RSS-centric companies are emerging all the time. One firm that Moore particularly admires is del.icio.us, which allows you to save websites you like, create labels for them, and share them with your friends. del.icio.us, makes highly creative use of RSS feeds. Moore says RSS and other technologies are poised to vastly expand online automated software programs, or what are called "web services." He thinks that more ways to acquire, share, and benefit from information will emerge. "There are a whole set of things which, taken together, are a new paradigm for software development," says Moore. "The revolution is that a set of elements now allow people, including end users, to very simply knit together powerful "web services." Moore thinks we are heading to a world of web services built around RSS and other simple web technologies. This will let just about anybody build on to someone else’s software application on the web. "The elements of this programming are very simple instructions, like URLs, RSS, and zip codes," he says. Even companies like enterprise software giant SAP could find themselves threatened, as pieces of their business become available as much simpler services on the web (Not sure how – after all the RSS /Feed readers can be used only for display!). In Future, companies will begin to figure out how to perform tasks, such as tracking inventory, using RSS feeds. There’s no question that RSS is one of the most powerful technologies of the Internet age.